North Korea obviously won't provide any realistic official data. This number will hence be based on dissenters' accounts. China has official statistics for convicted criminals, but also has "reeducation camps". The latter seem to be included and the number thus diverges from official statistics.

I'm sure the socialists in Venezuela would love to hear about how Capitalism is so bad, as they scavenge through garbage and eat rats because they haven't had a meal in weeks. All the while, Venezuela sits ontop of the world's largest oil reserves with trillions of dollars of potential wealth. Wealth that a capitalist system would have tapped into years ago...

Nonsense! There's a lot less of that in Venezuela today than when I was there in the 1990's
The US wants to destroy Venezuela and the US media spreads misinformation about it because it wants to control the oïl and be political master of the region.

I feel bad for the Venezuelans, but I do think their example is beneficial to the world. Anytime people start to think that socialism is the answer to their problems, there is a ready example of how it is definitely not. I'm reminded of this story from Ursula K. Le Guin. Venezuela suffers for our sins.

The problem is that people confuse "socialism" as it exists in Venezuela with "socialism" as most people in the US that actually have those leanings actually want.
Venezuela was more democratic and capitalist (though with some significant corruption) in the past - in fact, into the early 90s many businesses saw it as one of the best places in South America to invest.
What Chavez brought is realistically best described as a dictatorship trying to appease the masses with "socialist" giveaways. That never works.
What most Americans in favor of "socialism" want is something like what we see in Sweden, UK, Denmark, Canada, Germany, etc - things like universal healthcare and subsidized education - areas where capitalism simply hasn't worked. Not government control over industries like Chavez/Maduro push.

The dictatorship and the related corruption and inefficiency of the state-owned enterprises don't help anything. But I think the Chavez/Maduro price control system is what really sunk the country. When producing things and selling those things makes you poorer (because you can't cover the cost of production at the controlled price), you won't produce anything. People not producing valuable things = poverty.

Venezuela's is a complex story. Chavez was massively popular throughout his rule: he was a gifted public figure, but also because greater public control allowed a significant redistribution of wealth. Between 1999 and 2010, overall poverty fell from 60% to 23% of the population and acute poverty from 25% to 5% - declines that were unmatched anywhere else in the world in that period. This was underwritten by rapidly rising oil prices (although that could then have produced the same outcomes in the Nigerias, Mexicos, and Kuwaits of the world, which didn't happen). Other problems persisted: overseas (U.S. antagonism to Bolivarianism); regional (the move across the border of Colombian drug networks); and domestic (opposition from wealthier and Whiter Venezuelans). Chavez died right at the time of the collapse of oil prices. That, combined with Maduro's inability to manage the ongoing challenges, has hollowed out the promise many Venezuelans once fought for vigorously.

I think that's a fair statement @shortyoh. Many people want high taxes and free government health care, and those are reasonable desires. The dictionary definition of socialism is different though. To quote Wikipedia, socialism is "social ownership and workers' self-management of the means of production". I think if people are calling for "socialism", they should be very clear about what they want. Countries like Norway aren't socialist by the textbook definition. They are capitalist with high levels of taxation and social services. Which has been a successful model.

2,121,600 United States
1,649,804 China
Look at the percentages. The USA has 350million and China has about 1.5billion people.
China's percentage of crime seems very low -- actually, correction. What I should say is the USA has the highest percentage of crime in the world.

Just because the USA is big, that doesn't mean it has "the highest percentage of crime in the world." You're just letting your emotions get in the way of the facts. The US rate is nowhere near countries like South Africa, Honduras, Venezuela, Belize, and even India.

Arguably, countries like Guatemala would be much better off with a higher prison population. The fact that murders go unpunished is a large contributor to the ridiculously high murder rates in Central America.

One also should take some critical distance from the term "crime." Crimes reflect behaviors that ruling classes wish to discourage. In some cases (e.g. murder), there's near unanimity that such acts deserve punishment. In others (e.g. smoking marijuana, sodomy, critical journalism, begging, espousing Kurdish or Uyghur nationalism), there's not. The same can be said for types of punishment and their severity. The primacy of prisons as a form of punishment and the lengthening of sentences, of course, increase prison populations.

The U.S. murder rate is less than 1/10th that of the worst countries. We do, however, have a crime rate that is fairly high for industrial countries, as well as a large population and a functioning legal system. Combine those factors to arrive at our large prison population. However, the prison population of the United States is declining.

I think that "functioning" might be too strong of a word for the US criminal justice system. Granted, other countries have it worse. There are places where the justice system is more corrupt, more inept, more oppressive and less fair. And there are places where there just isn't a justice system or isn't much of one that are close to being lawless. But the US system still completely sucks. For many different reasons. and the US prison population is still ridiculously high, a lot of which has to do with the misguided and poorly implemented "war on drugs."

I'm definitely not a fan of the war on drugs, but it's a bit of a myth that drug dealers / drug users are filling up our prisons. Most people in the prison system are there because of violent crimes. However, it is true that many people commit assaults and murders while participating in the drug trade. If we legalized most drugs, we would probably see a lower rate of violent crime. I think it's something we should consider. On the other hand, it's better to imprison violent criminals than to let them go free.

Do you think it's also a myth that a for-profit prison system incentivizes harsher than needed sentencing and denials of deserved paroles? And what about the effectiveness of the penal system as a tool for rehabilitation?

Having been through the justice system myself before (for some pretty petty crap, and more than once when I was innocent), and screwed over royally each time by kangaroo courts that don't seem to give a crap about justice but only care about conviction rates and squeezing money out of people to pay for themselves, I might have a less rosy picture of the whole thing than most. I've also worked along side cops before. Most were scumbags. The good ones drop out or they get beaten down by the system until they lose their ideals and become a part of said system. Same goes for judges. The whole system is focused on the wrong things and aimed in the wrong direction.

And.. yes, drugs ought to be legalized. And I say this as someone who has never used any.

Highest percentage of prisoners and highest percentage of crime are not the same thing. And "crime" is dependent on the country in which the act is committed. Only a handful of crimes (mostly violent offenses, fraud, theft, etc.) are illegal in most places. I believe about half of U.S. prisoners are serving time for drug-related offenses. I'm not saying that drugs are fine, but I'd prefer to live in a society in which 10% of people are drug offenders than one in which 3% of people are murderers.
I'm not trying to defend the US and its egregious incarceration numbers. I am merely pointing out that the statistic on which this quiz focuses is not a simple indicator of anything. It's the result of a lot of different factors.

I'm looking at the pie chart you linked to QM and I think jmellor still has a point. The stat that's often thrown out there about drug offenders can be considered misleading because it only includes people in federal prison, where you've got 180,000 people locked up for non-violent crimes (more than half for drugs) and a measly 14,000 for violent crimes. It's easy to find fault with this because local jails and state prisons make up a much bigger piece of the pie than federal prisons. However, even at the state level barely half of all prisoners are there for violent crimes. And you've got 46,000 people locked up for drug possession- I know it's not a huge percentage of the total but that's still a travesty.

It should be noted that a significant portion of those listed in U.S. prisons are actually in local jails (about 600,000 people). A number of groups fall into this category: those awaiting trial, those serving out misdemeanor sentences, those awaiting transfer to a prison. The total U.S. prison population usually includes these people, as well as things like youth detention centers, immigration detainees, and Indian reservation jail/prisons as well. The actual number of people that are in what is usually understood by state and federal prison is about 1.5 million.

An interesting article for any who are wondering why the US has such a large prison population (for the record, it wasn't always that way). https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/mass_incarceration_a_provocative_new_theory_for_why_so_many_americans_are.html

Another very good example of a stat that should be presented as PER CAPITA do be meaningful. To check that out further (spoiler alert: US still NUMER ONE): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm